“It’s just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.”

The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.

Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.

We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says.

The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from…Circumcision of the heart.

Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.

I’m practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

We know we can’t be spiritually transformed by just focusing on the will.

That’s the illusion – the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out – and it has affected us in many ways. That’s a part of the idea that professing is enough.

God’s address is at the end of your rope.

When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, “Now what are we going to do about the darkness?” It’s gone!

God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.

We are becoming who we will be-forever.

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

That is why prayer is so exhausting and so vital. If we believed it, the prayer meeting would be as full as the church.

When the church is in mission, it is the true church.

Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.

I dont see we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government.

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.